Before our trip, we had researched Moroccan hammams and were genuinely excited to try one. We had loved our hammam experience in Turkey, so we went into this feeling pretty confident. We had done this before, we knew the general idea, and we figured we were at least somewhat prepared.

We were not.

The experience started in the dressing room, where we were given robes, sandals, and one small mystery item that looked like it could have been a face mask. Sarah was convinced it was an eye mask. I immediately flashed back to our hammam in Turkey, where I had been handed disposable underwear that looked like it had been created from a coffee filter and a prayer, so I was fairly certain this new item was also underwear. The problem was that this version looked more like some sort of string bikini designed for a doll.

We stared at it for a while, neither of us confident enough to actually put it on. So we did what any reasonable travelers would do when faced with unidentified spa clothing in a foreign country: we ignored it completely and kept our own underwear on.

Once we were changed, we were taken up to the rooftop and led into a tiny room with marble benches. The women helping us motioned for us to take off our robes and lie down, so we did. Then they left.

There was no explanation, no indication of how long they would be gone, and absolutely no direction about what we were supposed to be doing. We were just two nearly naked women lying on marble slabs in a very small, very hot room, wondering if we had missed an important part of the orientation.

At first, we just waited. Then we kept waiting and sweating, and then sweating some more.

It was so unbelievably hot that the whole thing quickly stopped feeling relaxing and started feeling like some kind of endurance test. The air was thick, it was hard to breathe, and after about fifteen minutes I was fairly certain we had accidentally signed up for an interrogation instead of a spa treatment. If someone had walked in and said, “Tell us what you know,” I would have immediately handed over passwords, bank account numbers, family secrets, and probably confessed to several crimes I had never committed just to get some air into that room.

Eventually, the women returned and covered us in some kind of slippery soap. Whatever it was, it immediately transformed the marble benches into a Slip ’N Slide.

At one point, Sarah’s woman told her to sit up, which sounded easy enough. Unfortunately, Sarah was now so completely coated in that slippery soap that gravity had other plans. She pushed herself up, immediately lost traction, and started sliding sideways off the marble bench like a bar of soap escaping the bathtub. Her woman caught her just before she hit the floor and barely reacted, as if preventing greased-up tourists from launching themselves off the furniture was simply part of the job description. Sarah somehow managed to get herself back onto the bench, but at that point any illusion that we were having a calm, elegant spa experience was officially gone.

Then the women left again.

Still no instructions.

At this point, the whole thing felt less like a traditional wellness treatment and more like some kind of experiment to see how long we could tolerate being steamed alive before one of us cracked.

I was cracking.

The room kept getting hotter, I was struggling to breathe, and sweat was pouring down my face and directly into my eyes until they were burning. I kept getting up, walking over to my robe, wiping my face, lying back down, and then doing the whole thing again a few minutes later.

Eventually, I hit my limit and went over to the door.

Was the air outside cool? Absolutely not. We were in Morocco and it was hot out there too, but at least it was different hot. At that point, I didn’t care what temperature it was. I just needed air to move.

So there I was, standing in my underwear on a rooftop in Morocco, opening and closing the hammam door over and over like a giant hand fan, desperately trying to create some sort of breeze.

Any concern I had previously had about modesty was completely gone. If someone walked by and saw me, fine. Enjoy the show. I was no longer worried about being half naked. I was trying to survive the spa treatment we had voluntarily booked.

Eventually, the women came back, which I assumed meant the torture portion was finally over.

It was not.

We had apparently moved on to the “dump buckets of water on the tourists” portion of the experience.

They began pouring water over us, which honestly felt wonderful after all that heat. Then one of the women pulled the front of my underwear away from my body and dumped water straight down it.

Okay then.

Before I could fully process that, she pulled the back of my underwear out and dumped water down there too.

By that point, I had completely surrendered. There were no boundaries anymore, there were no questions, and there was absolutely no point trying to understand what was happening.

Afterward, we moved on to the massage, and after everything we had already experienced, we thought this surely had to be the normal, relaxing part.

That was optimistic.

The massage was incredibly thorough. And when I say thorough, I mean they massaged everywhere that was not physically covered by underwear, and they got right up to the property line. There were several moments when I found myself staring straight ahead thinking, Well, we have reached a level of familiarity I did not expect today.

By the time we finally walked out, I was incredibly clean, slightly stunned, and very clear on one thing: I would never do that one again.

The heat was just too intense for me. It was genuinely hard to breathe, I felt like I was being cooked alive, and there was nothing relaxing about it. Any romantic idea I had of peacefully enjoying a traditional Moroccan hammam disappeared somewhere around the time I was standing in my underwear using the door as a fan and wondering how much longer I could take it.

And somewhere near the end of all of this, Sarah and I had the same realization:

We actually paid for this.

Not only had we voluntarily walked into this experience, we had handed over money to be steamed, scrubbed, soaked, nearly launched off a marble bench, and thoroughly massaged in ways neither of us had quite anticipated.

I am glad we tried it because it certainly gave us a story, and it taught us that loving a hammam in Turkey did absolutely nothing to prepare us for Morocco.

But would I willingly climb back onto that marble slab and do it again?

Not a chance.